On August 18, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published the first installment of
a three-part series of articles concerning crack cocaine, the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), and the Nicaraguan Contra army. The introduction to the first installment of the
series read:

For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of
cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug
profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury
News investigation has found.

This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the
black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack" capital of
the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . .
. and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons.

The three-day series of articles, entitled "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the
Crack Explosion," told the story of a Los Angeles drug operation run by Ricky Donnell
Ross, described sympathetically as "a disillusioned 19-year-old . . . who, at the
dawn of the 1980s, found himself adrift on the streets of South-Central Los Angeles."
The Dark Alliance series recounted how Ross began peddling small quantities of cocaine in
the early 1980s and rapidly grew into one of the largest cocaine dealers in southern
California until he was convicted of federal drug trafficking charges in March 1996. The
series claimed that Ross' rise in the drug world was made possible by Oscar Danilo Blandon
and Norwin Meneses, two individuals with ties to the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense
(FDN), one group comprising the Nicaraguan Contras. Blandon and Meneses reportedly sold
tons of cocaine to Ross, who in turn converted it to crack and sold it in the black
communities of South Central Los Angeles. Blandon and Meneses were said to have used their
drug trafficking profits to help fund the Contra army's war effort.

Stories had previously been written about the Contras' alleged ties to drug
trafficking. For example, on December 20, 1985, an Associated Press article claimed
that three Contra groups "engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance
their war against Nicaragua." Rumors about illicit activities on the part of the
Contras had also been probed in Senate hearings in the late 1980s. However, the Mercury
News series contained -- or at least many readers interpreted it to contain -- a new
sensational claim: that the CIA and other agencies of the United States government were
responsible for the crack epidemic that ravaged black communities across the country. The
newspaper articles suggested that the United States government had protected Blandon and
Meneses from prosecution and either knowingly permitted them to peddle massive quantities
of cocaine to the black residents of South Central Los Angeles or turned a blind eye to
such activity.

The Mercury News later proclaimed that the article did not make these
allegations. However, notwithstanding the Mercury News' proclamations, involvement
by the CIA and the United States government in the crack crisis was implied through
oblique references and the juxtaposition of certain images and phrases in the Dark
Alliance articles: the Contras, who purportedly received drug money from Blandon and
Meneses, were referred to as the "CIA's army" and links between the CIA and the
leadership of the Contra movement were repeatedly emphasized throughout the articles; the
stories reported how investigations into Blandon's cocaine operation conducted by the Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) were allegedly dropped without cause or shunted aside for
unexplained reasons; the articles told how United States prosecutors invoked the
Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) to prevent certain testimony concerning
Blandon from being presented to a jury in the interest of national security during Ross'
federal trial; and, from August 1996 until October 1996, the image of a crack smoker
silhouetted against the emblem of the CIA was emblazoned on the Mercury News web
page carrying the Dark Alliance stories.

The news media picked up on the Mercury News series' insinuation and made it
explicit in coverage of the series. On August 20, 1996, the headline of the first article
to cover the Mercury News series, published by the Associated Press, stated,
"Newspaper Alleges that CIA Helped Spark Crack Cocaine Plague." It was followed
by other articles and editorials declaring that the crack cocaine crisis had been created
by the CIA and/or agents of the United States government: "CIA's War Against
America," (Palm Beach Post, September 14, 1996); "The U.S. Government Was
the First Big Crack Pusher," (Boston Globe, September 11, 1996); "Thanks
to the U.S. Government, Oscar Blandon Reyes is Free and Prosperous Today; One Man is
Behind L.A. Tide of Crack," (Pittsburgh Post Gazette, September 16,
1996).

Critics and commentators would later debate whether the Mercury News articles in
fact accused the United States government of being responsible for the nation's crack
cocaine epidemic. In an October 2, 1996, Washington Post article, Gary Webb, the
reporter who wrote the Dark Alliance series, asserted that the article had not claimed
that the CIA knew about Blandon's drug trafficking. The Washington Post article
quoted Webb as saying, "We've never pretended otherwise . . . This doesn't prove the
CIA targeted black communities. It doesn't say this was ordered by the CIA.. . .
Essentially, our trail stopped at the door of the CIA. They wouldn't return my phone
calls." Webb would say as late as June 22, 1997, in an interview with The
Revolutionary Worker, "We had The Washington Post claim that the stories
were insinuating that the CIA had targeted Black America. It's been a very subtle
disinformation campaign to try to tell people that these stories don't say what they say.
Or that they say something else, other than what we said. So people can say, well, there's
no evidence of this, you know . . . You say, well, this story doesn't prove that top CIA
officials knew about it. Well, since the stories never said they did, of course they
don't."(1)

According to The Washington Post, Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos
stated that he was troubled by the interpretive leap many people made about the article's
claims of CIA involvement in the growth of crack cocaine. Ceppos was quoted as saying,
"Certainly talk radio in a lot of cities has made the leap. We've tried to correct it
wherever we could . . . People [have been] repeating the error again and again and
again." Approximately a month and a half after the Dark Alliance series was posted on
the Mercury News website, the newspaper changed the introduction to the articles,
in apparent recognition that certain wording had contributed to the misunderstanding.
Rather than stating:

For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips
and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin
American guerilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency . . .

the Dark Alliance website introduction was altered to read:

The Mercury News published a three-part series in late August that detailed how
a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the street gangs of
South-Central Los Angeles in the 1980s, sending some of the millions in profits to the
Contras. The series never reported direct CIA involvement, although many readers drew that
conclusion.

Regardless of the intent of the Mercury News, the accusation of government
involvement in the crack epidemic had taken root. This dramatic interpretation of the
series continued to build with ferocious velocity, especially in black communities, as the
Mercury News story attracted the attention of newspapers across the country.

Throughout September 1996, the Dark Alliance series was published in one newspaper
after another: the Raleigh News and Observer ran the articles on September 1, 1996;
the Denver Post published them on September 13, 1996; the Pittsburgh Post
Gazette ran them on September 15, 1996; and so on. While many other newspapers did not
publish the Dark Alliance series, they carried stories about the sensation created by the
series' claims. The story garnered further exposure from television and radio talk show
appearances by Gary Webb. Ricky Ross' attorney, Alan Fenster, also made several
appearances on television shows to assert that the government, not his client, was
responsible for cocaine dealing in South Central Los Angeles.

Many African-American leaders were particularly troubled by the articles, mindful of
the frequency with which young black men were being incarcerated for drug offenses. If the
Mercury News was right, it appeared that the same government that was arresting so
many black men had played a role in creating the drug crisis that precipitated their
arrest. This point was emphasized by the Mercury News' Dark Alliance series, which
included articles entitled, "War on drugs has unequal impact on black Americans;
Contras case illustrates the discrepancy: Nicaraguan goes free; L.A. dealer faces
life"; and "Flawed sentencing the main reason for race disparity; In 1993, crack
smokers got 3 years; coke snorters got 3 months." The president of the Los Angeles
chapter of the NAACP issued the following statement in response to the Dark Alliance
series: "We believe it is time for the government, the CIA, to come forward and
accept responsibility for destroying human lives." In a letter dated August 30, 1996,
Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) requested that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and
the House Judiciary Committee conduct investigations of the allegations. The Congressional
Black Caucus and many leaders in the black community also insisted upon an investigation
into the charges raised by the Mercury News.

As noted above, the Mercury News series was not only a story about the United
States government and crack cocaine. It also revisited allegations concerning the Contras
and drug trafficking that has been reported upon and investigated for many years. In 1987,
the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations began an investigation focusing on allegations received by
the subcommittee chairman, Senator John Kerry, concerning illegal gun-running and
narcotics trafficking associated with the Contras. A two-year investigation produced a
1,166-page report in 1989 analyzing the involvement of Contra groups and supporters in
drug trafficking, and the role of United States government officials in these activities.
Allegations of cocaine trafficking by Contras also arose during the investigation
conducted by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh into the Iran-Contra affair. Drug
trafficking allegations, however, were not the focus of that inquiry and the Walsh report
included no findings on these allegations.

The issue of drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan Contras has also been the subject of
books: e.g., On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, by Mark
Hertsgaard, 1989; Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America,
by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, 1991. It was also reported upon in the news
media. Following the December 1985 piece mentioned above from the Associated Press,
the San Francisco Examiner ran stories in 1986 about Norwin Meneses, Carlos Cabezas
(an individual with links to Contra organizations who was convicted in the mid-1980s of
drug charges), and drug trafficking by the Contras.

It is undisputed that individuals like Meneses and Blandon, who had ties to the Contras
or were Contra sympathizers, were convicted of drug trafficking, either in the United
States or Central America. There is also undeniable evidence that certain groups
associated with the Contras engaged in drug trafficking. The pervasiveness of such
activities within the Contra movement and the United States government's knowledge of
those activities, however, are still the subject of debate, and it is beyond the scope of
the OIG's investigation, which we describe below. Yet it is noteworthy that, as
interesting as the story of Contras and illicit drug deals may be, it was not the catalyst
for the public's or the media's interest in the Dark Alliance series. Investigations into
the alleged connection between Contras and cocaine dealing were conducted and articles
were printed in the late 1980s, at a time when interest in the Iran-Contra story was
cresting. Neither those investigations nor the published articles tracking the allegations
sparked a firestorm of outrage comparable to that created by the Dark Alliance series. The
furor over the Mercury News series was driven by the allegations of the
government's complicity in cocaine deals within black communities. If the Dark Alliance
series had been limited to reporting on Contras, it seems unlikely that the groundswell of
press and public attention would have occurred.

Notwithstanding the Mercury News' explosive allegations, the series did not
receive extensive coverage from major newspapers in either August or September 1996. The Los
Angeles Times briefly discussed the Mercury News series in several articles in
August and September 1996 that covered Ross' postponed sentencing and other events in the
Ross trial. Similarly, the Dark Alliance series did not initially receive much television
coverage. With the exception of CNN, which ran several pieces on the story in September,
and the NBC Nightly News, which ran a piece about the allegations on September 27, 1996,
the story received little national television news coverage. By early October 1996,
however, that changed.

The Washington Post weighed in first on October 2, 1996, with a short analysis
-- "Running with the CIA Story: Reporter Says Series Didn't Go as Far as Readers Took
It" -- noting that the allegation of CIA involvement in drug trafficking in the
United States had not actually been made in the article. The Washington Post
followed-up two days later, on October 4, 1996, with a story entitled, "The CIA and
Crack: Evidence Is Lacking of Alleged Plot." The Washington Post piece
concluded that "available information does not support the conclusion that the
CIA-backed Contras -- or Nicaraguans in general -- played a major role in the emergence of
crack as a narcotic in widespread use across the United States." The Washington
Post article mainly addressed the Mercury News series' claims about Ross' and
Blandon's roles in the growth of crack cocaine. It did not, for the most part, wrestle
with the series' claims about drug dealing by the Contras. The Washington Post
noted that the series had been selective in its use of Blandon's testimony to support its
claims:

The Mercury News uses testimony from Blandon in establishing that Nicaraguans
selling drugs in California sent profits to the Contras. But if the whole of Blandon's
testimony is to be believed, then the connection is not made between Contras and African
American drug dealers because Blandon said he had stopped sending money to the contras by
[the time he began selling to Ross].

And if Blandon is to be believed, there is no connection between Contras and the cause
of the crack epidemic because Blandon said Ross was already a well-established dealer with
several ready sources of supply by the time he started buying cocaine from Blandon.

The Washington Post piece also emphasized apparent contradictions between Ross'
and Blandon's accounts. For example, while Blandon claimed to have been a used car
salesman in 1982 who on the side sold two kilograms of cocaine for Meneses, Ross said
Blandon was instead handling bulk sales of 100 kilograms of cocaine for Meneses at the
time. The article did not seek to resolve these issues and merely noted the conflicts.

The Washington Post piece was followed on October 20 and 21, 1996, by two New
York Times articles that also found fault with the Mercury News series. One
article, "Though Evidence Thin, Tale of CIA and Drugs Has Life of Its Own,"
primarily reported on the reactions within the black community to the series. The other
article, "Pivotal Figure of Newspaper Series May Be Only Bit Player," noted
problems with the series' portrayal of Blandon and Meneses. It concluded, after conducting
interviews of various unnamed sources:

[W]hile there are indications in American intelligence files and elsewhere that Mr.
Meneses and Mr. Blandon may indeed have provided modest support for the rebels, including
perhaps some weapons, there is no evidence that either man was a rebel official or had
anything to do with the C.I.A. Nor is there proof that the relatively small amounts of
cocaine they sometimes claimed to have brokered on behalf of the insurgents had a remotely
significant role in the explosion of crack that began around the same time.

After reportedly assigning three editors and fourteen reporters to the story, the Los
Angeles Times published its own three-part analysis of the Mercury News piece,
which ran from October 20 to October 22, 1996. The Los Angeles Times concentrated
on three claims raised by the Mercury News series: 1) that a drug ring related to
the CIA had sent millions of dollars to the Contras; 2) that the same drug ring had
created a cocaine epidemic in South Central Los Angeles and other United States cities,
and 3) that the CIA had approved a plan for the ring to raise money for the Contras
through drug trafficking or had deliberately turned a blind eye to the drug ring's
activities. The Los Angeles Times found that "the available evidence, based on
an extensive review of court documents and more than 100 interviews in San Francisco, Los
Angeles, Washington and Managua, fails to support any of those allegations."

The first installment of the Los Angeles Times series was devoted to a
discussion of the origins of crack cocaine. It found that crack cocaine existed in Los
Angeles long before Ross began selling it. In response to the claim that Ross had played a
principal role in bringing cocaine to South Central Los Angeles, it identified several
drug dealers from South Central Los Angeles who were contemporaries of Ross and were
reputed to have sold similar quantities of cocaine.

The second installment of the Los Angeles Times series explored whether there
was in fact a CIA-sanctioned operation that funneled millions of dollars into the Contras.
It found no proof that Blandon and Meneses had given millions of dollars to the Contra
party and could confirm only that Blandon had given about $50,000. Indeed, the Los
Angeles Times article concluded that the Mercury News had arrived at its
million-dollar estimate of Meneses' and Blandon's donations based on its own calculations
derived from "the volume of cocaine that they were selling, and Blandon's statement
that what he sold, he gave to the Contras."(2)
Rejecting the Dark Alliance assertion that Blandon had sent profits to the Contras from
1981 to 1986, the Los Angeles Times found, based upon Blandon's testimony, that he
had sent profits to the Contras in only one year. The second installment of the Los
Angeles Times series also suggested, based on interviews with various CIA officials
and former government officials, that CIA involvement in such a scheme was improbable. But
the article quoted the chief investigator for Senator Kerry's subcommittee investigation,
Jack Blum, as saying that, while the CIA did not have agents selling drugs to fund
the Contras, the United States government may have opened channels that helped drug
dealers bring drugs into the United States and protected them from law enforcement.

The last installment of the Los Angeles Times series examined the reaction in
black communities to the series, particularly the proliferation of conspiracy theories.

The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post
articles were criticized by some who believed that the mainstream press was attempting to
minimize a story that it had failed to cover. Some accused the papers of erecting strawmen
by accusing the Mercury News of making allegations that it had not in fact made: e.g.,
that the CIA "targeted" communities into which crack cocaine was distributed.
Others stated that the major papers had committed the same mistakes it criticized the Mercury
News of making: e.g., selectively picking from among available information to
support their conclusions, crediting information provided by suspicious sources, and
failing to evaluate contradictory evidence.(3)

Despite the major newspapers' mounting criticism of the Dark Alliance series, the Mercury
News continued to defend its story. However, in the meantime the paper launched its
own investigation of the claims made by the Dark Alliance series. On May 11, 1997, Jerry
Ceppos, the Executive Editor of the Mercury News, published the results of the
newspaper's analysis of its own series. Ceppos wrote that the story had four
short-comings: 1) it presented only one side of "complicated, sometimes-conflicting
pieces of evidence"; 2) it failed to identify the estimate of Blandon's financial
contributions to the Contra movement as an "estimate"; 3) it
"oversimplified the complex issue of how the crack epidemic in America grew,"
and 4) it contained imprecise language and graphics that fostered the misinterpretation
concerning the CIA and crack dealing. Ceppos attributed some of these problems to the
newspaper's failure to present conflicting evidence that challenged its conclusions. The
column also revealed that the same debate over the correct interpretation of the Mercury
News' conclusions found in the press also existed in the Mercury News newsroom:

The drug ring we wrote about inflicted terrible damage on inner-city Los Angeles, and
that horror was indeed spread to many other places by L.A. gangs. Webb believes that is
what our series said. I believe that we implied much more, that the ring was the pivotal
force in the crack epidemic in the United States. Because the national crack epidemic was
a complex phenomenon that had more than one origin, our discussion of this issue needed to
be clearer.

Some of the reporting on Ceppos' column by the major newspapers failed to recognize
that it was not intended as a repudiation of the entire Dark Alliance series. Rather, it
was a limited admission that portions of the story had been misleading and should have
been subjected to more rigorous editing. Ceppos specifically did not disclaim what he
believed were the articles' central allegation -- that a drug ring "associated with
the Contras sold large quantities of cocaine in inner-city Los Angeles in the 1980s at the
time of the crack explosion there" and that "some of the profits went to the
Contras." It is noteworthy, however, that the facets of the article about which
Ceppos had the greatest reservations were the articles' most sensational claims -- the way
crack cocaine spread in the United States, and the ties between the CIA and the spread of
crack.

It is difficult to discern which allegations the Mercury News intended to make,
in large part because the series is replete with innuendo and implication that verge on
making assertions that are in fact never made. Many readers interpreted the series to
assert that the CIA and other agencies of the United States government had intentionally
funneled crack cocaine into black communities by either permitting or endorsing cocaine
trafficking by Blandon and Meneses. Others interpreted the Dark Alliance series to charge
that the spread of crack cocaine was the unintended -- but proximate -- result of actions
taken by the United States government to promote the Contra war effort. While the series
does not allege that there was a deliberate plan to target black communities by the CIA or
other agencies of the United States government mentioned in the article (e.g., DEA,
U.S. Attorney's Offices, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the
articles strongly imply such a plot.

First, the title of the series, "Dark Alliance," is itself ambiguous, since
the series fails to identify the parties to the purported "alliance." One
interpretation is that it refers to the link between Blandon and Ross. However, another
interpretation, bolstered by the repeated mention of the CIA throughout the series, is
that the title refers to an agreement between the CIA and drug-trafficking Contras. The
web page bearing the "Dark Alliance" title and the image of a crack smoker
silhouetted against the CIA emblem strengthened the insinuation. The Dark Alliance story
also included leaps of logic that suggested direct CIA involvement in Blandon's
trafficking activities. For example, the article notes: "The most Blandon would say
in court about who called the shots when he sold cocaine for the FDN was that 'we received
orders from the -- from other people.'" An explanation of how the CIA created the FDN
from various anti-communist factions immediately follows the quote. The writer's
implication is patent: the CIA was giving "orders" to the FDN about cocaine
deals.

One oft-quoted portion of the articles relates to a meeting that allegedly occurred in
Honduras among Meneses, Blandon, and Enrique Bermudez, a leader of the FDN's military
effort. The preceding paragraph in the article recounted how cocaine "has spread
across the country . . . turning entire blocks of major cities into occasional war
zones." The paragraph that immediately followed reads:

"There is a saying that the ends justify the means," former FDN leader and
drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes testified during a recent cocaine trafficking trial
in San Diego. "And that's what Mr. Bermudez (the CIA agent who commanded the FDN)
told us in Honduras, OK? So we started raising money for the Contra revolution."

The implication of this paragraph, made through its juxtaposition to the discussion of
black communities ravaged by cocaine, is that a "CIA agent" decided to raise
money for the Contras by any means, including by selling cocaine in black communities. It
is noteworthy that the parenthetical reference to Bermudez as a "CIA agent who
commanded the FDN" was added by the Mercury News and was not a statement
actually made by Blandon. The parenthetical underscores reputed ties between Bermudez and
the CIA.

The specter of a government-wide plan to target black communities is raised throughout
the article in other ways, but mostly through innuendo. The subtext of the article seems
to be: If there was no government plot, why else would an Assistant U.S. Attorney prevent
evidence relating to Blandon's drug trafficking from being raised in open court under the
claim of protecting classified information during a 1990 federal trial?; how else would
Blandon have escaped more vigorous prosecution by the Department of Justice or other
prosecutor's offices for drug trafficking?; why else would federal agents descend upon the
Los Angeles Sheriff's Department to claim evidence obtained in a search of Blandon's home
in 1986?; and how else would Meneses escape arrest and prosecution in the United States or
be allowed by the INS to freely enter and exit the country? While the allegation of a
deliberate government plan was not explicitly made, the drumbeat of questions insinuated a
multi-agency, government scheme designed to protect Blandon's illegal activities, which
"opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black
neighborhoods of Los Angeles."

The Mercury News stated repeatedly that the series was not intended to allege a
deliberate government scheme to use cocaine dealing in black communities to finance the
Contra effort, notwithstanding the logical inference that could be drawn from the series'
substance. But while it is true that the articles did not explicitly allege a government
conspiracy, the path charted by the Dark Alliance series' trail of implications led to
that conclusion. In fact, a prophetic editorial that appeared in the Mercury News
on August 21, 1996, the day after the Dark Alliance series finished running in the paper,
made just that point. It read:

[T]he CIA-Contra story can only feed longstanding rumors in black communities that the
U.S. government "created" the crack cocaine epidemic to kill and imprison
African-Americans and otherwise wreak havoc in inner cities.

At times, the Mercury News sent conflicting messages that confounded attempts to
correct misconceptions about the article. While the newspaper was disavowing allegations
of CIA involvement in the spread of crack, the articles' author was making public comments
to the contrary. In an article entitled, "The CIA-crack connection: The story nobody
wants to hear: Your worst fears are true -- the CIA did help to smuggle drugs into
American ghettos, says an investigative reporter," Webb was asked whether his story
had confirmed the suspicion within the black community "that the crack cocaine
epidemic might be part of a government conspiracy." He replied:

It confirms the suspicion that government agents were involved. Clearly, when you're
talking about drug dealers meeting with CIA agents it does go a long way toward validating
this suspicion. There's a grain of truth to any conspiracy theory and it turns out there
are a lot of grains of truth to this one. If you want to stretch it to its logical
conclusion, the government was involved in starting the crack epidemic, because it was
this pipeline that did it. Now we know what we didn't know in the '80's -- which is where
they were selling the stuff. We were able to close the circle and show how this affected
American citizens, whereas before it was some sort of nebulous foreign policy story. Now
we can see the damage. Whether or not these guys were part of our government or just
contract agents is unclear.

Further, the newspaper itself was sending mixed messages. An August 21, 1996, Mercury
News editorial supported claims of CIA or United States government involvement. The
editorial, entitled "Another CIA disgrace: Helping the crack flow," stated:

It's impossible to believe that the Central Intelligence Agency didn't know about the
Contras' fund-raising activities in Los Angeles, considering that the agency was
bankrolling, recruiting and essentially running the Contra operation. The CIA has a long
history of embarrassing the country it is supposed to work for, from the Bay of Pigs in
Cuba to the jungles of Vietnam. But no action that we know of can compare to the agency's
complicity, however tacit, in the drug trade that devastated whole communities in our own
country.

1. In contrast, Webb has made other statements all but stating that
the Dark Alliance series did demonstrate CIA involvement in the spread of crack in
America. In September 1996, in the immediate wake of the Dark Alliance series, Webb
reportedly posted the following comment on the Mercury News electronic bulletin
board: "One thing I did want to respond to directly is the writer who claimed there
wasn't any 'proof ' of CIA involvement in this thing. That's like saying there's no proof
of General Motors involvement in making Chevrolets. I also heard a great line while I was
doing a radio show in Florida yesterday: `Now we know what CIA really stands for: Crack in
America.'"

2. In a response to a May/June 1997 Columbia Journalism Review
article analyzing the Mercury News series, Webb more specifically explained how he
arrived at a figure, which he believed to be between $12 million and $18 million: "My
stories were about the drug money [Blandon] admitted delivering to Meneses for the FDN.
When you look at that cash, the sums are obvious. Blandon told a federal grand jury in
1994 that he sold between 200 and 300 kilos of cocaine for Meneses in L.A. In court,
Blandon swore that all the profits from that cocaine went to the contras, and said he was
selling it for $60,000 a kilo ... Some might call it an extrapolation to describe $12
million to $18 million as 'millions.' I call it math."